the Friday Five

Over at the RevGals' place, Terri posted the following, and asked us to list five gratitudes we recognize in our life.


The Place I Want To Get Back To

is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness

and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me

they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let's see who she is
and why she is sitting

on the ground, like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;

and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts bestowed,
can't be repeated.

If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

(Mary Oliver, "Thirst", Beacon Press, 2006)

so here goes (only five?)

1. my possessions, privileges.luxuries -- as someone else said already, a house, a yard, a vehicle, clothing, books to read, food to eat.

2. the inheritance -- good genes, good health, good teaching, good models and examples.

3. today: sunshine, moderate temperatures, trees leafy in the backyard, geraniums blazing on the front stoop.

4. all the weird little bits of half-worn-out tin and/or plastic cr*p that make housekeeping so easy, that I reach for instinctively ...the cheese grater, the pastry scraper, the strainers, the dumb little 29c plastic coffee 'dripper' that doesn't need a filter insert...

5. more and more, the presence and witness and company of the RevGals.

Nefertiti the Wondercat says, "speaking of gratitude, how's the cat's breakfast coming along? Also the pothos is beginning to look a bit dry and weary. Just sayin'."

just for now...

On Having Misidentified A Wild Flower
By Richard Wilbur

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

back later, I hope.

and here I am, after another good day. I made a pastoral call this morning -- getting mileage out of my new white blazer, and very happy with the effect of the white jacket over black clerical shirt and slacks...

Mrs. B and I had a mutually satisfactory time talking about the poetry we remember and how different it sounds to us in our "old age"...and how grateful we are to have been made to learn so much by heart when we were younger.

This led on to reflections on the pastoral and homiletic utility of English poetry in ministry to seniors...how much they recognize, how much they remember -- I'm talking about things like Tennyson (In Memoriam and "Crossing the Bar") and Kipling and Browning and Leigh Hunt ("Abou ben Adhem").

It has been a very pastoral-visit kind of week -- this was the third -- and I have been writing thank-you notes, and I have a phone-call to make tomorrow -- then wallop the lections into submission for Sunday's sermon, and do the shopping and pre-prep for our students' supper on Sunday evening.

The sermon "series" is going well. I am working in part from Chrysostom's principles e.g. that Jesus ALWAYS knows EXACTLY what he is doing -- and that he is manoeuvring his auditory (sometimes a doubled one, disciples and crowd, or disciples and Syro-Phoenician woman) into seeing for themselves what they would resist if it were simply offered to them didactically. If there is a theme, it would be "Jesus is the Lord of Improv." (I have theatre-folks of great age and eminence in the congregation, and they leap about gleefully, within their limits, whenever I talk about the theatricality of the gospel stories. It is FUN!)

At the end of the day I had a good supper at home: a nice modest-sized piece of steak, a baked potato with a sliver of blue cheese, and a great wad of fresh spinach cooked helpless and anointed with balsamic vinegar. Introduced by a large bowl of salad -- as Peg Bracken said, it fills the stomach and tires the jaws, and that's all good.

Oh yes! a beautiful lunch with The Lady Father today, by way of celebrating BIRTHDAY!

Love after Love -- Derek Walcott

Not preaching this week, folks, and I have nothing to bring to the breakfast table at the moment except a poem which has been thrust at me this week from a number of sources. I hope you find it as up-building as I do!

Love After Love

Derek Walcott


The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

a poem I couldn't resist sharing, an echo from my previous life

Did I Miss Anything?

Tom Wayman
From: The Astonishing Weight of the Dead. Vancouver: Polestar, 1994.

Question frequently asked by
students after missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren't here

___________________________


Tom Wayman's works copyright © to the author.

a poem

This came to me in email from inward/outward: A project of the Church of the Saviour:

At Fifty-Seven
I feel like I stumbled
down a hill of years, only
to land in a pile of my books.

Along the way, I cracked
like a Russian doll; finding
something smaller and more
essential inside every version
I've known as me.

And now, when all I know
bursts into flame each time
I try to give it away, I'm asked
what matters.

There's something perfect
in how we're worn; like sculptures
left for Spirit and wind to finish, the
film taken from our eye just as
our heart is exposed, one
crumbling into the other.

--Mark Nepo.

And that's all I know about it -- although "At Sixty-Five" would also fit, as a title, from where I sit!

Thomas et al.

(who's this "Al" character, anyhow?)

Ok this is the GIST of tomorrow's sermon. Or maybe the PITH. Preaching seems to consist mainly of GISTS and PITHS...some of mine are pithier than others. Sometimes they are so pithy, I could jutht thpit (OK, that's not original).

Here is Misnamed Thomas again, waiting for us to notice that he IS named in Scripture, and he isn't called Doubting, he's called Didymus -- Twin Thomas. And coyly, Sceripture doesn't tell us who his twin was/is. We hear all about Simon Cyrene's kinfolks, but not Thomas's double. And you thought this was an accident?

Thomas is not in the group when the group is visited by Jesus; why not? He was too sad? he was too distraught? his kid had hockey practice? No. Thomas was not there because the group needed him to encounter Jesus in their midst in a different way which would enrich, deepen, validate, GROUND their encounter with the Risen One. The story requires somebody to be out of step with the rest.
This isn't the first time Thomas has been wrong-footed -- not to forget he was the one of the whole bunch that got on board with the outrage of Jesus' explanation of what was going to happen at Passover. "OK, then, if he's going to get killed, let's all go get killed while we're at it." Not the words of a doubter. Not a skeptic.

Because Thomas is not a skeptic -- he's like Umberto Eco, who in dialogue with Carlo Cardinal Martini, douce man that he was, defended himself: "I am NOT a skeptic, Your Eminence -- I am merely NOT CREDULOUS." (cuz credulity ain't faith, right?)

I could digress here about 15 minutes' worth on how Thomas just keeps his screen door hooked, and then I would quote THIS in its entirety...


Easter Morning
William Stafford

Maybe someone comes to the door and says,
"Repent," and you say, "Come on in," and it's
Jesus. That's when all you ever did, or said,
or even thought, suddenly wakes up again and
sings out, "I'm still here," and you know it's true.
You just shiver alive and are left standing
there suddenly brought to account: saved.

Except, maybe that someone says, "I've got a deal
for you." And you listen, because that's how
you're trained---they told you, "Always hear both sides."
So then the slick voice can sell you anything, even
Hell, which is what you're getting by listening.
Well, what should you do? I'd say always go to
the door, yes, but keep the screen locked. Then,
while you hold the Bible in one hand, lean forward
and say carefully, "Jesus?"

But I probably won't.

The point is that the group needs the challenge of that wonderful moment when out-of-step Thomas says, "My Lord and my God" -- they still had the initial clutch-and-grab oh-good-he's-back reaction -- they weren't going to move off that place of comfort without Thomas's near-blasphemous blurt.

But then there's another piece of the story -- and I don't for one minute think that Jesus was "dissing" Thomas. The story is told to reassure people who were not part of the Old Original Galilean Veteran Marching and Chowder Society, and could never have been. Because we plant our foot as a faithful people on the reality, the factuality, of an event in time, but we have to avoid getting ourselves boxed into "back in the day," "you had to be there" thinking. So Jesus speaks reassurance to those who will not see and yet will believe. That would be US, my dear brothers and sisters. We haven't missed anything essential, by being "born out of time."

That's our comfort. But there's never comfort without challenge; and the challenge comes in asking "HOW" those who have not seen are blessed? They must be blessed by the witness of those who have encountered the Risen One. And this is where the rest of the disciples are, by implication, smacked on the head. Because their witness is not effective -- they don't say, "Jesus is Risen!" No, they say, "WE have seen the Lord!" and no wonder Thomas says, in effect, "Well, big whoop for you." Their witness has not yet made room for the gift of the Holy Spirit, which they received so casually on Jesus' first visit (reference here to the explanation by Peter in the Acts passage, that the Spirit herself is witness to the resurrection in and through those who are proclaiming it -- even the original generation who "saw it with their own eyes."

And that is our challenge -- so to receive the power of the Holy Spirit that our own witness will be effectual blessing to our neighbours.

I think that's all. Obviously I've got to peel it back a good deal.

I love Thomas, can you tell? He's right up there with Jonah among My Favourite Gnarly Friends of God.

Oh yes -- the "other" twin? I have a strong suspicion that Thomas is twin to each of us...

In re: Ann Coulter, et al.

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

-- W. H. Auden, "August, 1968" City Without Walls

the ultimate bane

I am distressed by the number of blogging friends who seem in the last recent while to have come to the parting of the ways with their parishes -- and not on friendly or peaceful terms, either. It is most sad. Also irritating--and stimulates my desire to "get mediaeval" on the parishes in question (I stumble about the office muttering, "burn that sucker DOWN... and sow it with SALT... and commit a NUISANCE in the ashes..." -- not really the Great Tradition in pastoral spirituality; but so it is).

In the last twenty-four hours, however, I have come on the total, ultimate, retaliatory curse upon recalcitrant, stiff-necked, hard-hearted, ungrateful, acting-out, terminally stupid parishes.

and it is this--this, friends, will make them rue the day they were born.

THE SELF-STYLED PARISH POET.

Now we've had a couple of innocuous specimens at MH & U over the years -- many of them very elderly, so that one can apply the Nonagenarian Factor to evaluations of their efforts; "Well, Gladys is SUCH a sweetheart, and SO brave, what with the arthritis and the yaws and all...it really is lovely of her to write us yet another poem about the dear Queen, isn't it?"

But I've run head-on into a far more virulent embodiment (rather like running into the edge of an open closet-door in the dark)...

The only comparable work I can refer you to would be the poetry of Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn. Or, if you must have your "Canadian content" -- the oeuvre of the immortal Sarah Binks, Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan.

Examples will follow. From the Binksiana. Stay tuned.

And may your parishes, if they love you, be safe from poets.

a propos of this week's events in Prairie Metropolis, and elsewhere...

Oh, the glamor, and the clamor that attends the affairs of state
tend to fascinate the rabble and impress some folks as great.
But the truth about the matter in terms of loss and gain,
there ain't one inauguration worth a good, slow, two inch rain.
-Carlos Ashley
1904 - 1993

"Inaugurations" being in the same list with the pompes funebres of over-publicized popular entertainers...and the liturgical faux pas of elected officials...and you can fill in your own list, I think.

A tip of the Rambler-Hat to the Fraternal Unit for the quotation!

Updates...

Just a whole lot of fine things this week already under the general heading of the goodness of God etc.
A couple dropped by yesterday to arrange for their youngest daughter's baptism on Sunday. Two older children (girl, 6 maybe; boy, not quite 3) were in the party. To my complete amazement, the older children greeted me, introduced themselves, settled without to-do on the office steps (leading into the chancel) and were instantly immersed in...BOOKS... Later I took them on a walk around the inside of the church; they solemnly and politely observed from a distance while our substitute organist practised...and they went away very happy each with a copy of "Life in the Eucharist." Which the little girl promised to read to the little boy. You could have knocked me down with a stone block of wood... Children! Reading! I thought they were all extinct!

Then I decided to SPEND my birthday gift card for a very high-end stationery store, so I had a lovely self-indulgent time perusing all, but ALL, the merchandise ("Would you care to fondle some pens?" was the proprietor's sympathetic question). Found some nice Monet water-lily note-cards, notes for the Daughter Unit and SIL, and an utterly chi-chi little pad of monogrammed purse-notes, in a fancy gilt cover with JOOLS on it, and a magnetic clasp.

And then I took myself to lunch (hedonism being the order of the day at this point). There are a number of high-end eateries in the same neighbourhood as the stationer. Most were busy, so I opted to try Il Violino, a recent replacement of a former favourite in a big old house, hoping it might be good...


AHHHHHHHHHHHH. "La gastronomia Italiana," indeed. Elegant, elegant, elegant, and sufficient in quantity, and not unduly expensive, even without the Seniors' 10% discount (next year, next year)...and with a lovely glass of Pinot Grigio...and I read ALL of Sinners Welcome (Mary Karr), over my lunch, including the essay on Poetry and Faith. I had been given her childhood memoir, The Liars' Club, by one of my wedding couples, with the encouraging review, "This book makes ALL our families look NORMAL." Loved it...and so ordered the poetry collection. My, my, my. I started "Delinquent Missive" --
"Before David Ricardo stabbed his daddy
sixteen times with a fork..."
and I thought, "Mary Oliver she's not"...but oh there are such interesting points of contact even so.

So one way or another yesterday was a bit of an ORGY. (We were due for one.)

And this morning the secretary/bookkeeper, safely returned from her vacation (in itself no mean blessing), reports that we are eighteen thousand dollars IN THE BLACK...and it's still only August, folks!!!

I have about six little tasks to do here and then I am skibbling home to do housework and call it a day off...funeral tomorrow, wedding Saturday, baptism Sunday...and it's going to be hot again this weekend too.

Vacation company.

One of the joys of these driving holidays in the mountains is getting into truly quirky bookstores -- I have a fondness for Bacchus Books, whence I never come away without something of value. This trip, it was a Carol Shields title I'd never seen before, "A Celibate Season" -- a novel in letters, which Shields co-wrote with...somebody else...(blush to say I've forgotten the name). Highly entertaining, I recommend it.

And I had taken along a satchel full of miscellaneous theology, of which I really read only a part of Jaroslav Pelikan's "The Melody of Theology: A Philosophical Dictionary" -- very stimulating it was, too, and satisfyingly opinionated without being cranky.

In some ways it was a very Mary Oliver-ish kind of vacation trip - lots and lots of deer, herons too, and even four bears -- had there been any owls or foxes visible, it would have been just about perfect from the point of view of her bestiary. I had with me one volume of her "New and Selected Poems" (or "Selected and New," I'm not perfectly sure!) -- and this was the one that hit home most powerfully.


Grass

"Those who disappointed, betrayed, scarified! Those who would still put their hands upon me! Those who belong to the past!

How many of us have weighted the years with groaning and weeping? How many years have I done it how many nights spent panting hating grieving, oh, merciless, pitiless remembrances!

I walk over the green hillsides, I lie down on the harsh, sun-floavored blades and bundles of grass; the grass cares nothing about me, it doesn't want anything from me, it rises to its own purpose, and sweetly, following the single holy dictum: to be itself, to let the sky be the sky, to let a young girl be a young girl freely -- to let a middle-aged woman be, comfortably, a middle-aged woman.

Those bloody sharps and flats -- those endless calamities of the personal past. Bah! I disown them from the rest of my life, in which I mean to rest."

Poets'n'them

Looking a little further into Marie Howe, the poet who wrote "The Star Market," posted here yesterday, I found a useful link right here. Enjoy!

Speaking of poetry, one of the high points of the last couple of weeks for me was reading the January 11th issue of the Times Literary Supplement, a lifeline -- it's very pricey but it's lightweight, so I can fold it up small and read it in bed and if I fall asleep and drop it on my face, it's unlikely to hurt me...these are considerations! This issue included a short essay by Vikram Seth, and three of six poems he wrote "after the manner of" George Herbert, since moving into Herbert's former Rectory at Bemerton, near Salisbury. I knew 'of' Seth only as a contemporary South Asian writer of Very Fat Novels (not in-bed reading, i.e.), but not at all as a poet. As it's largely owing to exposure to George Herbert et al., when I was 19, that I'm an Anglican...anything about his poetry interests me. And Seth's poems are the most reverent and proficient imitations I've read in a very long time. Apparently they've also been set to music, all six, as a song cycle. I don't have access to the music. Not yet!

NB: you can look at these poems right here if you like!

After a quiet day yesterday (recuperating from the AGM on Sunday), I went to the Roman Catholic basilica for a service of "Consecration to the Ordo Virginum"--the "consecrated" being a young professor of Biblical studies. Most interesting service, and the church was jammed to the rafters. The congregation included more elderly women religious than one would have believed were still extant.

And so, like Pepys, home and to bed.

"The Star Market"

This is from the January 14th New Yorker. The poet is Marie Howe.

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them--sour milk, bad meat--
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I only touch the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

Oh be joyful...

Lo! in the rectorial inbox this morning...links to the complete text of Mike Higton's book, online; look for it here.

and, most delightfully, a Litany of Mercy based on the passage I quoted yesterday! You can find the Litany right here.

Try to ignore the twitchiness of the presentation and the continuous fall of little artificial leaves -- reminds me of the final scene of Cyrano de Bergerac as it was staged in Stratford (Ontario)...45 years ago!

And this is all from a parishioner in the aftermath of last Sunday's sermon and reading and conversation!

The Little Towns of Bethlehem

I don't yet have the skills to reproduce this WITH the typographical spacing, which is quite important to the total effect, so I'll just post a link instead.


This was the poem that I read in lieu of sermon at the late service Christmas Eve. You can read it here.